Lesson 5 of 6
Keep your own voice
6 min read
Ever read something and think, "a robot wrote this"? There's a house style to plain AI writing — and you don't want yours to have it.
The tell of generic AI-speak
Left to itself, AI writes in a bland, over-polite house style: "I hope this email finds you well," "delve into," "in today's fast-paced world." It's grammatically perfect and completely faceless. The fix isn't a magic setting — it's showing the AI what you sound like.
AI defaults to an average of everyone. Your voice is the specific thing that average erases — so you have to hand it back.
Give it a sample of you
Paste in a few things you've actually written — a couple of past emails, a message you're proud of — and say "match this voice." The AI picks up your rhythm: short sentences or long, formal or breezy, the words you'd never use. A few good examples teach it more than an instruction like "be casual".
Show, don't tell. Two real samples of your writing steer the voice better than a paragraph describing it.
Keep a short "style file" — three or four snippets of your best writing. Paste it in whenever you want the AI to sound like you instead of like everyone.
The shape of it
- —Plain AI writing has a generic, over-polite tell — grammatical but faceless.
- —Feed it real samples of your writing and ask it to match your voice.
- —Examples beat instructions: show it how you write, don't just describe it.
You want the AI's emails to actually sound like you. What works best?
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